Overcoming Bush and Blair: Towards a New Diplomacy

Shaun Riordan

"Man is something that shall be overcome" - Nietzsche: Also Sprach Zarathustra

The apparent alliance between Bush and Blair over international terrorism and Iraq conceals sharp ideological differences. Unless Saddam plays his hand peculiarly ineptly, these differences are likely to emerge in the next few months. They are important to understanding the challenges that confront international relations, and those who seek to manage them.

Essentially, Bush adopts the traditional realist approach. The function of the US government is no more and no less than the protection and promotion of US national interests. Foreign nations and nationals are either threats to those interests, or potential allies willing to help pursue them, either because they share them, or see it in their own interest to do so. Since 11 September, US policy has focussed largely, although not exclusively, on the threat to US nationals and interests from international terrorism or rogue states with weapons of mass destruction. The core approach was summarised by Bush's declaration last year that "you are either with us or against us".

Blair's approach is heavily influenced by Robert Cooper's division of the world into Pre-modern, Modern and Post-modern states¹. Post-modern states (largely based on the shared sovereignty and openness of the European states) are, almost by definition, the way of the future and the culmination of civilization. They are based on a series of democratic and liberal values that all the world would share were they but to have the good fortune to live under the right kind of regime. Pre-modern and Modern states pose serious threats to the existence and welfare of Post-modern states. On these premises, Cooper has justified a moral neo-imperialism in which Post-modern states justify military intervention in failed or rogue states not only in terms of the threat to themselves, but also as a moral crusade on behalf of their suffering citizenry: thus the interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and, soon presumably, in Iraq.

Over Iraq, these differences relate not so much as to what to do, but rather the how and wherefore, and the what then. For Bush, the object is simply to neutralise, and ideally topple, Saddam´s regime. The nature of what replaces it is less important than its allegiance to Washington. If removing Saddam can produce a domino effect in which other unfriendly regimes can also be replaced by more reliable clients in a US oil-producing sphere of influence (soon to be called the "Perle doctrine") so much the better. In this scenario, using the UN is not so much a return to multilateralism, as a necessary, if irritating, prelude to the broader strategy. The Israel-Palestine conflict is a complication which must be contained in the short term. In the longer term, within the broader strategy, Israel's interests are identical to the US and a solution acceptable to Israel can be imposed.

The Blair/Cooper doctrine is radically different. Saddam must be replaced not only because he poses a threat, but because of his appalling treatment of his own people. The replacement regime should be a democratic liberal democracy, with the potential at least of joining the post-modern world. An equitable solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict is an essential adjunct of intervention against Iraq, but morally and to convince the Arab (and wider Islamic) peoples of the justification of action against Iraq.

Both approaches are deeply problematic. As I have argued in my recent book², the realist approach to diplomacy has an abysmal record of failure, even by its own criteria. The narrow pursuit of short-term advantage, without broader ethical element or consideration of the internal nature of either other states or allies, has a tendency to come back to haunt its perpetrators. Both 11 September (perpetrated by a former ally of the US against the Soviet Union) and Iraq (where Saddam himself was a former protégé of the US against Iran) are striking examples.

The current campaign against terrorism demonstrates the problems. Conceived as a multi-national (not multi-lateral) alliance of states under US leadership, its fundamental aim is the eradication of the threat to US interests. Other states have signed up either because they perceive a shared threat, or to avoid themselves becoming targets of the campaign. In either case, the agenda and tactics are set firmly by Washington. In purely, and traditionally, security terms the campaign has had some successes. It has undoubtedly damaged Al Qaeda, probably more than many sceptics thought possible (although Bali and Mombassa have shown the extent to which Al Qaeda retains a lethal capacity). Yet it has not engaged in the crucial battle of ideas, or taken account of the crucial underlying social, political and economic conditions which allowed Al Qaeda to flourish. Without doing so, even the complete destruction of Al Qaeda would be only the prelude to the emergence of new, possibly even more lethal, terrorist networks.

The Blair/Cooper doctrine takes more account of the battle of ideas, but has its own problems. Firstly, Cooper's schema of pre-modern, modern and post-modern states assumes a form of moral superiority of the latter, and that therefore all rational people would want to live in a post-modern state. Thus, while the doctrine teaches intervention on moral grounds, those grounds are decidedly Western, and not open to fundamental debate - the imperialism suddenly does not look so new. Albeit with good intentions, it confronts with incredulity anyone with a different world view (which may include much of the world's population).

Secondly, it is creating very real problems for Western foreign and security policy. In recent years, Western (primarily US) military intervention has led to the creation of international (primarily NATO) protectorates in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (more correctly Kabul - the rest of the country has been abandoned to the war lords). Given the US aversion to peace keeping and nation building, the burden for these protectorates has fallen mainly on the Europeans. These are long term commitments if the countries are not to revert to dangerous instability (in the case of Kosovo, it is not clear what constitutional status would allow NATO withdrawal without destabilising the region). Given the ethnic make-up of Iraq (Kurdish in the north, Sunni in the centre and Shiite the south), military intervention there would inevitably create yet another protectorate. It is questionable to what extent such protectorates will remain politically, economically or militarily viable. Western governments must justify them both to their own publics, who pay and provide the personnel for them, and to wider world opinion, which they must convince this is not simply new colonialism.

If both the Bush and Blair approaches are deeply problematic, any alternative approach to western security will need to take fuller account of the changes that have occurred in international relations over recent years. These include:

• New technology: new information communications technologies (ICTs) with cheap and easy mass travel have created a highly interconnected and world. The rapid movement of information through dense and highly connected networks has reduced reaction times and increased the instability of the world as an economic, social and political system. New opportunities, and dangers, have opened up for constructive and destructive governmental and non-governmental players;
• Break-down of the division between domestic and foreign policy: the globalisation of many traditionally domestic issues - environment, health, trade, economic policy - has made meaningless the traditional distinction between domestic and foreign policy. At the same time, it has undermined the traditional monopoly of foreign ministries over foreign policy, and the adequacy of traditional generalist diplomats;
• New levels of international governance: the break-down of the foreign-domestic policy divide has meant that regional and local government is increasingly involved in international relations. Aided by the new ICTs, regional and city governments are increasingly participating in multi-level networks of governance, challenging the monopoly of the traditional nation states. At the same time new forms of supra-national government have emerged. Unlike traditional inter-state treaty organisations, bodies like the WTO and EU have evolved their own autonomous power and power structures;
• New international players: major commercial companies have always had an international role. But now many of the major multinationals are able to operate autonomously of national governments, effectively following their own foreign policies with their own internal foreign ministries. At the same time, the private sector is surreptitiously taking over traditional diplomatic functions: credit card companies and travel agencies are increasingly (and more efficiently) providing consular services to travellers abroad; consultancy and lobby companies are offering the same services as Embassy political and commercial sections; recently there has been talk of private security companies even taking on peace-keeping roles.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are not new, but have grown exponentially in recent years. The new ICTs, which allow small groups of geographically dispersed political activists to combine effectively, has opened up new possibilities. NGOs are still feeling their strength, but Greenpeace, Amnesty and the anti-globalisation movement have already had real impact. Combined with widespread disillusion with traditional politics, key political debates are increasingly, and worryingly, between NGOs and multinational companies, with governments left to one side.

Crucially for foreign policy makers, these new elements have come together to allow new forms of political activity. To a large extent, these have coalesced around opposition to what is perceived as the dominant ideology of a homogenised global free-market capitalism. In western countries disillusionment with traditional political parties has seen, particularly young, people channelling their political activity through a range of NGOs from environmental and human rights to the broader and looser anti-globalisation movement. Such groups have developed in developing countries, but these countries have also seen the development of a violent reaction. Al Qaeda differs from traditional terrorist groups which have focussed on particular regional or local political issues through its wholesale opposition to the western project, as well as its globally networked structure.

While not wanting to compare either NGOs or the anti-globalisation movement with Al Qaeda, there is to some extent a broad continuity of resistance to neo-liberal globalisation. Confronted by the apparently overwhelming US military, economic and political superiority, protest groups and movements are forced to seek alternative strategies of resistance. The concept of asymmetric warfare, of which Al Qaeda terrorism is a horrific example, is long familiar in military analysis circles. Less familiar is the concept of asymmetric resistance, encompassing asymmetric warfare, but also the whole range of alternative resistance strategies, including on-line campaigns, mass demonstrations, denial of use attacks, lobbying campaigns, publicity stunts etc. Such asymmetric resistance, both violent and non-violent, is likely to be a permanent feature of the 21st century scenery. Asymmetric resistance will also increase in sophistication, using the weapons made available by the new technology (including cyber-terrorism), and combining different techniques in "swarming and pulsing" campaigns (Arquilla and Ronfeldt³). Future attacks may see bombs combined with mass demonstrations and cyber attacks on military or financial information systems.

Asymmetric resistance and the broader changes described above have posed a series of new challenges to foreign policy makers. So far neither diplomats nor diplomatic services have been able to adapt. They have retained outdated structures, outdated modes of operation and outdated thinking. The very diplomatic nomenclature - embassies, counsellors, consuls etc - show the burden of the past. The investment in bricks and mortar and hierarchical structures have left them ill-suited to the more flexible modern networks. They have proved incapable of incorporating the new players, governmental, non-governmental or commercial, in new structure of global governance. Old-fashioned methods of political analysis, which take no account of new developments in scenario building, computer modelling or complexity theory, have left them floundering in an ever more complex and rapidly changing world, forced ever more into reactive policies.

For professionals dependent upon networks (of information, influence etc) their ignorance of how such networks are structured and operate is striking. One example will suffice. Following 11 September foreign policy makers and analysts agreed that Al Qaeda was a network like the internet. Given that the internet had originated in a project to render US command and control invulnerable to nuclear attack, they argued that Al Qaeda could prove similarly invulnerable. Yet the internet was not constructed on the basis of the original Rand designs (the original papers are available on the Rand web-page⁴). Rather, as Barbási⁵ and others have argued, it has developed as a highly clustered network extremely vulnerable to concerted attack. In as far as Al Qaeda is structured like the internet, it is similarly vulnerable.

Diplomats have been incapable of coming to terms with the new players. They are defensive and resentful of the private sector invading their functions. Instead they should welcome this, taking advantage both to off-load some functions allowing them to focus on core responsibilities, and of synergies with private sector operators. They need also to work more closely with various non-governmental bodies in promoting ideas and values. As Leonard⁶ has pointed out in a series of publications, the promotion of ideas and values, or public diplomacy, cannot be the work of government alone. Indeed, government is frequently mistrusted, almost by definition, in a way that NGOs, think tanks and cultural bodies are not. In the struggle for ideas, the role of governments and diplomatic services is more that of catalysts and co-ordinators than implementers.

Similarly, Nye⁷ has pointed out that public, or soft, diplomacy , is about winning the argument through dialogue and conversation. It is not good enough simply to present your values and then use clever marketing, or strong persuasion, to force others to accepts them. Western governments need to engage in genuine dialogue with the non-western world, as well as their critics at home, to establish core shared values that can provide a basis for future coexistence. This is neither comfortable or easy. The west is used to assuming the superiority of its values, whether democratic liberalism, neo-liberal free markets or Marxism, and then imposing them on the west. But this will no longer wash.

Failure to radically reform western thinking on international relations, and its tools for managing them, risks exacerbating the tendencies to widespread asymmetric resistance, and subsequent insecurity. Iraq again underlines the risks, and in doing so brings together two of the paradigms devised for the post-cold war world. Bush, imbued with Fukuyama´s end of history, risks provoking Huntingdon's clash of civilizations. By appearing to make Muslim countries the sole target of his war against terrorism, he may provoke a long term confrontation between the west and Islam which it is by no means clear that the west would win.

Notes
1. Robert Cooper: The Post-Modern State and the World Order (Foreign Policy Centre/DEMOS, London 2000)
2. Shaun Riordan: The New Diplomacy (Polity Press, Cambridge 2003)
3. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt: Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terrorism, Crime and Militancy (Rand 2002)
4. The original papers by Paul Baran can be found on the Rand web-page
5. Albert-László Barbási: Linked: the New Science of Networks (Perseus, Cambridge 2002)
6. Eg Mark Leonard and Vidhya Alakesson: Going Public. Diplomacy in the Information Age (Foreign Policy Centre, London 2000)
7. Joseph Nye: Bound to Lead: the Changing Nature of American Power (Basic Books 1991)

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